Internet failure hits two continents

The majority of Internet and international telephone traffic travels goes under the sea. When two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were cut (most likely by ship anchors) on Wednesday, Internet connectivity in the Middle East and in parts of Asia cratered.

Extensive Internet failure has affected much of Asia, the Middle East, north Africa

It has caused major disruptions to business, television and phone services

Several reports say damaged cable in the Mediterranean could take a week to fix

In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Engineers in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.

The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India, where many U.S. companies outsource customer-service call centers and other back-office operations.